Follow this link to my BLOCKBUSTER STORY of how Brett Kimberlin, a convicted terrorist and perjurer, attempted to frame me for a crime, and then got me arrested for blogging when I exposed that misconduct to the world. That sounds like an incredible claim, but I provide primary documents and video evidence proving that he did this. And if you are moved by this story to provide a little help to myself and other victims of Mr. Kimberlin’s intimidation, such as Robert Stacy McCain, you can donate at the PayPal buttons on the right. And I thank everyone who has done so, and will do so.

Monday, May 13, 2013

Untangling Michelle Goldberg’s Confused Thinking on Abortion

Well, I predicted it, didn’t
I? On Friday I wrote a post
talking about how Ariel Castro might be tried and executed for the unlawful
termination of Amanda Berry’s children (thanks to Ace for the link). And I predicted at the time we would see
pushback from the pro-choice side and what do you know? Pro-choice feminist Michelle Goldberg is making
the argument that if we try Castro for the murder of Berry’s fetuses, this
is somehow a blow against choice or something.
Let’s examine her arguments for a moment.

First, she is complaining that
this means “that legally, ending a pregnancy is a greater crime than keeping
three human beings locked in a squalid dungeon for a decade.” Well, she is viscerally right. What Castro allegedly did to those three
women calls for the death penalty on its own, even if no child was conceived
and killed. But this potential
incongruous result isn’t the fault of the people at large, but the Supreme
Court’s activism. The Supreme Court had
long said that raping adult women could not be a capital offense and more
recently added that this was the case even when the victim was a child (as
these girls were when abducted). I have
considered those opinions ultimately unjust, but the fact we can’t get the
fullest measure of justice—execution—for those women is no reason to deny
justice to those unborn victims of Castro.

Besides there is a practical
benefit of making this guy dead so he can never bother anyone again.

Also Goldberg is concerned that the
precedent might then be applied to women who carelessly (or otherwise) harm
their own bodies. “They’ve been employed
to prosecute pregnant drug addicts, alcoholics, and those who refuse medical
interventions recommended by doctors.” So
with the first category she apparently wants to protect a woman’s right to
choose illegal drugs. And likewise she
is concerned about legal but self-destructive behavior that harms third
parties. Personally I don’t see how that
is different from drunk woman accidentally driving her car over a cliff with
her (fully born) baby in the seat next to her, killing her child but not
herself. Certainly in that case charges
for negligent homicide would probably be appropriate.

Only the last example involves a situation
that might be sympathetic and you wonder what Goldberg is leaving out. Yes, if the medical procedure recommended engendered
something invasive or dangerous that would seem to be a poor reason for
prosecution especially under the current law of abortion and privacy. On the other hand, maybe all the doctor said
was “you need to start taking these prenatal vitamins or your fetus will
die.” So I would like to hear the facts
before deciding this is outrageously outrageous. I have asked her for a more specific example and
I will let you know if she responds.

The reason why I wonder what
Goldberg is leaving out is because she left a great deal out of another
example. She cited the Bei Bei Shaui case
as another example of supposed prosecutorial abuse, writing:

a pregnant woman
named Bei Bei Shuai tried to commit suicide in Indiana by drinking rat poison.
Friends rushed her to the hospital and she survived, but her baby, born by
Caesarean at 33 weeks, suffered a brain hemorrhage and died. As a result, she
was charged with murder and is currently awaiting trial in September.

The State also
contends that even though A.S.'s birth changed her legal status from
"viable fetus" to "human being," it was Shuai's actions
that caused A.S.'s death. Therefore, the date she ingested rat poison should
have no bearing on how Shuai is charged or prosecuted.

The State, to prove
causation, need only prove the injury inflicted "contributed mediately or
immediately" to the victim's death...
Even if there was an intervening cause of the victim's death, it does
not absolve the defendant of murder unless that intervening cause was so
extraordinary and unforeseeable that it would be unfair to hold the defendant
responsible.

In fact, as reported on this very
website, the same court held that when Brett Kimberlin’s last bomb tore apart
the body of Carl DeLong, leading to DeLong’s suicide several years after the
fact, that Kimberlin was responsible for that death. Which is why I can say today that Kimberlin
caused the death of Carl DeLong. So what
has happened here, according to the prosecution, is that Ms. Shaui took actions
that ultimately led to the death of a fully-born baby. And Ms. Goldberg would like to offer the
defense that Ms. Shaui did it when the person in question was an unborn fetus.

What was also significant in the
appellate case was that Ms. Shaui “had intent to kill [her baby] independent of
her intent to kill herself.” You see Ms.
Shaui had been having an affair with Zhilian Ghuan, a married man and probable
cad. Mr. Ghan broke off that
relationship even though he knew her to be pregnant with his apparent
child. So after Shaui researched suicide
methods and chose the ingestion of rat poison, she wrote an email to Ghuan:

On December 23, when
Shuai was thirty-three weeks pregnant, she wrote Guan, saying she felt she and
the fetus were a burden on Guan, she had resolved to kill herself, and she was
"taking this baby, the one you named Crystal, with [her]." (State's
Ex. 25 & 26.) Shuai then ingested rat poison. Shuai called Guan and told
him she had ingested rat poison and was going to die.

So according to that, part of her
intent was to kill the fetus.

And notice something else curious
here: she called it a baby. The truth is
that abortion has inserted a bit of B.S. into our language. If a woman is expecting and joyful, we ask
“when is the baby due?” Some people then
ask if they can “touch the baby” by holding her stomach (do not ever do this
without the woman’s consent). And of
course if there is fetal movement felt on the surface of the mother’s belly, we
say “the baby kicked.” Likewise, if the
woman suffers a miscarriage, we say she “lost the baby.” We don’t tell a woman distraught by such a
loss that she only lost a “fetus.”

And yet if woman aborts, we say
she killed a fetus.

Or consider the mini-controversy
created when Publix put out this ad:

Over at Twitchy they reported on
several people seeing
the ad as pro-life. Which prompted Claire
O’Connor to note that Publix denied having any pro-life agenda at all. And you know what? I believe that is probably true. The reality is that in our culture we
naturally think of it as a baby. So Publix’s
ad writers, probably with absolutely no agenda at all, just naturally imagined
a family treating pregnancy exactly the way most people do most of the time:
they treated it as a baby who just ain’t come out yet. In fact, I would not be surprised if this was
a recreation of a real scene that occurred in one of the ad writers’ lives.

But because abortion has become
an oddly central plank in the feminist movement, the pro-choice movement has
driven us to contort our language to literally
dehumanize the babies growing in the bodies of these women. The Supreme Court led the way on this front,
writing in Roe
v. Wade that

The appellee and
certain amici argue that the fetus is a "person" within the language
and meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment. In support of this, they outline at
length and in detail the well-known facts of fetal development. If this
suggestion of personhood is established, the appellant's case, of course,
collapses for the fetus' right to life would then be guaranteed specifically by
the Amendment. The appellant conceded as much on reargument.

The Supreme Court considered it
absolutely essential to deny the personhood—i.e. the humanity—of the fetus in
order to justify abortion and pro-choice advocates have mirrored this approach
ever since.

The irony in this is that with
her own language, Bei Bei Shaui seems to have rejected that newspeak. She didn’t say she was “taking this fetus, the one you named Crystal with
me.” She said she was going to kill
their baby. She was admitting that in her mind what she
was planning was a murder-suicide, very likely in a fit of spite toward Mr.
Ghuan (her anger being justified even if her actions were not). And while that kind of statement doesn’t
determine the legal status of the life inside her, it does make it a little
strange to dress her up in the cloak of abortion rights.

Meanwhile, the facts of the Shaui
case also lays bare another problem with the “treat the fetus as a nothing”
approach. Her suicide email suggested
that she was motivated as much by a desire to hurt her ex-lover as to end her
own suffering. It recalls for me one of the
more thought-provoking episodes of Law
and Order called “Breeder.” That is
season 4, episode 13, for those of you who want to look it up on Netflix and
the like. The episode featured a pair of
grifters, a man and a woman, who promised their unborn child to multiple
childless families in order to get money from them. A.D.A. Ben Stone (Michael Moriarty) charged
them with extortion because she constantly threatened to end the life of the
fetus if she didn’t get payment from those families. After all, it is as much extortion to
threaten the life of another person (i.e. “do this or I will kill your wife”)
as it is to threaten your own (i.e. “do this or I will kill you”). The defense attorney, predictably, argued
that it is not extortion to threaten to kill a fetus because it is not a person
under the law. They made these arguments
in the judge’s chambers and Stone made this argument as well: “The statute also
covers threats to damage property. And
if, as you state, a fetus is not a person at any point in its gestation—”

I screencapped the judge’s
response as she interrupted him, because really a picture captures it in a way
that words cannot:

If you have trouble reading it, she cut him off, saying, "I don't want to hear the end of that argument, Ben." Stone was clearly about to argue
that if the law can’t treat the fetus as a person, then it should treat it as
property. The judge didn’t have to say why the argument was unacceptable to
her, but at the risk of hitting you over the head with what is obvious, our
nation’s sad history with slavery is exactly why it is dangerous to call any
human “property.”

But if the defense got its way,
the fetus would be instead be treated as a nothing. The woman could extort money based on a
threat to murder her unborn baby, and the family that wanted to adopt would
have no remedy at law. Which would
present another incongruity in the law that would be laid at the feet of feet
of those who think feminism begins and ends with abortion.

And indeed why is abortion so
central to the certain feminists? After
all, many of the founding mothers of feminism, like Susan B. Anthony, were
pro-life. They had no trouble
reconciling the idea that women should be free to work, to vote and so on, with
the idea that abortion should be severely restricted, if not banned outright.

Well, to a certain extent I think
it is for the same reason why a paraplegic thinks that the right to own a
wheelchair and to demand that the world be modified to be wheelchair accessible
is central to his or her liberation. This
is true for most disabilities and the need to accommodate them. The desire of a disabled person to be
accommodated is
the desire for maximal freedom in every respect.

The pro-choice feminists likewise
are seeking an accommodation. And as
suggested by my choice of language, I do think it is almost as though they see
women’s reproductive role as a disability.
Of course there are women who wear the ability to bear children as a
badge of honor and think men are poorer spiritually because we cannot. But in purely material terms, it appears to
be largely all downsides for women. If
we are to be cold and clinical about this, the state of pregnancy entails a
temporary disabled status by which for nine months women increasingly lose
their ability to operate effectively until they are typically so disabled that
they can’t even work. And I haven’t even
mentioned pain, morning sickness and so on.
And while it is illegal for employers to discriminate against a woman
based on pregnancy or even the fact she might get pregnant, we know it happens
regardless. Yes, birth control pills have
a 99% effectiveness but that 1% of the time the pregnancy might come at
potentially the worst possible time in a woman’s life. Indeed Murphy’s Law dictates this to be the
case.

As I wrote on disability
accommodation and gun ownership:

And gun ownership by
the handicapped also taps into another big philosophical belief I have about
the handicapped. In a very real way,
humanity is the disabled species. Think
about it. Compared to other species, we
are slow, weak, blind and deaf; we have little sense of smell, our teeth and
“claws” are weak, etc. If left naked in
the wild we would be easy supper for the other animals out there. And yet we dominate the planet for one simple
reason: our brains. And those brains
have allowed us to create tools that in turn makes up for our
deficiencies. So we can’t run as fast as
a cheetah, but we invented motor cars that allowed us to move even faster and for
long periods of time. We can’t see like
an eagle, so we invented the telescope and can see things no other creature
can. Our brains haven’t just leveled the
playing field between animal and man, but in fact gave us a critical advantage
over them which is why we rule this planet and no longer have any natural
predator (except ourselves).

And in no area has
our brains been more critical in making up for our psychical deficiencies than
in combat. Now we might suspect a few
tough souls like Chuck Norris or Todd Palin** could take on a grizzly bear with
their bare hands, but for most of us, if we don’t have a gun we are SOL (and
from my understanding, even with a gun they are hard to kill). Our only option is to run.

So to tell a
disabled person that they can’t use artificial help goes directly against the
grain of what we have done as humans.
For instance, I have difficulty writing by hand. But it only affects my ability to write by
hand, so I buy a computer and I am rendered “normal.”

Likewise, Mr. Boyd
has cerebral palsy. I have known people
with that condition and it almost certainly impairs his ability to win a
fistfight. I’m not saying he can’t do
it, but it’s almost certainly harder.
Now, the anti-gun approach would tell him tough and that he would just
have to remain defenseless and hope that if someone attacks him that he cops
get there in time. But the second
amendment allows him to say, “screw that,” and defend his own life and safety
as need be.

It is profoundly human in that
sense for women to say, “I would like us humans to use our big brains to master
a genuine difference between the sexes: the fact women have babies and men do
not.” And much like many cases with disability
accommodation, in order for the accommodation to be provided, someone else’s
rights must be curtailed. A business
owner might prefer to avoid the expense of making his business wheelchair
accessible. Heck, he might not even like
the handicapped. But his failure to
accommodate limits the freedom of disabled people and we as a society have said
that in most cases the rights of the business must give way.

The problem in the case of abortion
is the fear that you are actually costing people’s lives when you do it. And if we can borrow a little more language
from the law of disability accommodation, what the pro-life forces are saying
is that at some point after conception and before birth, the fetus becomes a
living baby in gestation and therefore the desire for an abortion is an
unreasonable request for accommodation.

Indeed this focus on
accommodation is exactly why Justice O’Connor seems to push what for me was
originally a mystifying concept in the law: the viability standard. Particularly with justices Justices Souter
and Kennedy in Planned
Parenthood v. Casey, O’Connor
argued that abortion could not be banned until the fetus reached
viability. I admit for the longest time I
found this argument hard to understand for two reasons. First, because my focus was primarily on the
fetus and second, because she and her colleagues were being cryptic.

From the orientation of the
fetus, it is strange to suggest that a being was unworthy of protection until
it could live independently. Christopher
Reeves, after his accident riding horses, was unable to live independently of
machines the rest of his life. And yet
no one would argue that others should be allowed to kill him for that
reason. And likewise conjoined twins,
a.k.a. “Siamese” twins, often live sharing an organ and the like. In these cases one twin is dependent of the other for life, and the independent twin
could potentially live a more “normal” life without the other and yet we don’t
say it is okay for one twin to kill the other.
When it comes to the status of the fetus viability makes no sense.

But once you change your
orientation toward the mother and her desire to be accommodated it all makes
sense. What O’Connor was thinking, but
didn’t quite say (perhaps because it was indelicate or just plain odd) is that
if a woman didn’t want to be her baby after it reached viability, she could
just give birth early, give up her rights as a mother to the state and wash her
hands of the entire thing. So her right
to abort the fetus ends—except in cases where the mother’s life is in danger—the
moment she can give birth without killing it.

Which is still pretty strange as
logic goes. For one, has anyone ever
heard of a woman doing such a thing?
Asking a doctor to induce labor early, and then giving away her baby, so
she can stop being pregnant without killing the baby? Indeed, would a doctor even consent to such a
procedure? In my life experience I have
never even heard of such a thing. Premature
births are always accidents, not something the woman chose to do, in my
experience. But I imagine in O’Connor’s
mind the fact no woman has done it (as far as I know) might be irrelevant; only
the possibility it could be done, thus changing the moral landscape for her,
mattered.

And not for nothing, but the
other thing O’Connor probably likes about the viability standard is that
eventually it will pretty much swallow the right to an abortion whole. One doesn’t have to be a fan of Lois McMaster
Bujold to recognize that someday science will create things like artificial
wombs. In her sci-fi universe she
imagines a planet where abortion is banned, but no woman is required to carry a
child to term because of artificial womb technology. She even imagined women who had been raped in
war sending their fetuses back the invaders’ planet and telling them it was
their problem. So O’Connor might very
well picture a day when a Supreme Court could write, consistent with her
opinion in Casey, that since a fetus
can survive outside its mother’s womb from even conception in an artificial
womb, abortion is banned entirely, except for health reasons.

But if I can be criticized for
focusing too much on the fetus, it is because it is the one who is voiceless
here. The reasonable fear in the
abortion debate is the fetus is literally voiceless. They can’t defend themselves, they cannot
vote, they cannot even cry out in pain so that the woman could hear it.

And indeed in our linguistic
attempt to dehumanize the “fetus” that is precisely what abortion advocates are
trying to do—to forget that the fetus is human and indeed might have feelings. They are trying to make you forget about,
well... this:

The scientific reality is that a
fetus is alive, conscious and even sentient before birth. Indeed studies have shown, for instance, that
if you play classical music to a baby in the womb that the child will be, on
average, better at math later in life.
How is that possible if the fetus is not fully sentient before birth?

And while I have never had a
child of my own, through my larger family I have seen babies just barely
born. They are not blank slates. You see already in them personality traits
that they carry all the way into adulthood.
The idea that a fetus is a giant nothing until it emerges from the womb
has to be one of the least scientific assertions in human history, going
against both scientific data and ordinary human experience. It would be almost as ridiculous as insisting
that gravity pulls upward.

What I think is responsible for a
great deal of this moral confusion, however, is the reality that there is a
deep disconnect between the legal approach to abortion and what I believe is the
common philosophy on the matter. The
reasoning in Roe—as opposed to its
outcome—is deeply out of step with American culture and morality. Simply put, a fetus gestating in a woman’s
body is always called a baby... until someone wants to kill it. Roe v.
Wade’s decision that a fetus is not a person and cannot be made a person is
in fact deeply out of sync with how ordinary people see the issue.

This also contradicts other areas
of the law. For instance, just about
every state in the union has a law against animal cruelty. And indeed most of them ban bestiality. What person is being harmed by such cruelty? The answer is obviously none. And yet there is no serious argument that
because a dog is not a person you have a constitutional right to do with it as
you please to it, but that is precisely the argument made with the fetus. There
is even a movement to confer personhood status on animals. The irony is that often the very people who
join PETA and so on, devoted to ending animal cruelty, don’t seem overly
concerned with cruelty toward human fetuses.

Of course the Supreme Court has
an easy way around this: conditional personhood. That is the courts can count a fetus as a
person for one purpose and deny the fetus’ personhood for another. This is already done, for instance, with
regard to corporations. They are
“persons” in the sense that they can sue and be sued under their legal names,
form contracts and even exercise freedom of expression. But the New York Times Company cannot cast a
ballot in the next election; the people who associate together to create the
New York Times have to vote as individuals.
The same could easily be done for fetuses, calling them persons when a
person wishes to unlawfully abort them (either without the consent of the
mother or otherwise unlawfully), but say they are just “fetuses” when the
mother wishes to lawfully abort them. If
Castro gets the death penalty, and the Supreme Court upholds it, that approach
is extremely likely to be the one adopted.

But that is not consistent with
the science or any kind of logical morality.
And it is worth taking a moment to imagine what I think is the most
logical and moral approach for abortion.

Let’s start with something
basic. Faith and morality cannot
determine the facts, but they can determine how we respond to the facts when it
comes to the law. For instance, a few
years ago a woman in Nigeria got pregnant several months after her husband
died. The people of her village said she
was obviously an adulterer (in the sense that it was sex outside of the context
of marriage) and sentenced her to be stoned to death. You might remember from the story that she
claimed to have been raped. She later
admitted it was a lie, told because understandably she did not want to be
stoned to death by the local barbarians.
You might also remember that the Nigerian Supreme Court then set her
free. What you might not know is that
their reasoning was downright bizarre.

If the Nigerian Supreme Court had
just said, “we are setting her free because only savages think that women
should be stoned to death for adultery” that would have been ideal. But instead the reasoning went like
this. She was being stoned to death
under Islamic law. But according to the
same Islamic law, a man’s seed can live inside a woman up to seven months after
death and cause pregnancy. So since she
was within that window and since there is in their country an irrebuttable
presumption that a child conceived when a woman is with her husband or seven
months later, she did not commit adultery.
It was as a matter of law, her husband’s baby. Which if you are minimally versed in
reproductive science is just daft.

And while I am glad to see that
the woman won’t be stoned to death, there will be unintended consequences. When it comes to rough justice, there is
always unintended consequences. Imagine
if, for instance, instead of being dead her husband had divorced her six months
prior to conception. So that gives the
husband an unjust claim over the child, and denies to the real father a just
claim. Whatever argument there is for
saying that while two people are married any children produced is presumptively
their children, it doesn’t apply seven months after the relationship has ended.

So in an American courtroom we
should never defer to the unscientific dictates of any faith. So for instance you take the Catholic
objection to birth control—meaning birth control that doesn’t involve
abortion. According to the priests I
have spoken to, the idea is simply this.
The reproductive organs of our bodies is where big “C” Creation occurs. In other words, when conception occurs it is
not just a biological process of DNA mixing, but an act of God creating a fetus
just as He did in the Garden of Eden.
And so it is considered wrong to interfere artificially with that act of
creation or the zone where it occurs.

And there are exceptions to
that. For instance, if a woman has
ovarian cancer, there is nothing wrong with a doctor going in to stop
that. And likewise if a woman has a
medical need for birth control medication beyond
the desire to prevent pregnancy that’s kosher, too. Which naturally leads a lot of Catholic women
to decide that they suddenly need birth control for unrelated health problems
when they have a steady boyfriend. This
even led to this somewhat absurd discussion with a member of my extended family
where she admitted she was having pre-marital sex with her boyfriend:

Me: Well, you’re using protection, right?

Her: Doesn’t the Catholic Church teach us not to
use contraception?

Me: Yeah, and the Catholic Church also teaches
you not to have sex outside of marriage.
If you are going to break one rule, you might as well break the other.

Oy vey!

That is also why the Catholic
Church does allow for one kind of birth control (besides not having sex): the
so-called rhythm method. And having a Catholic
wife (I am a Protestant) and a Catholic wedding, I got the Catholic lecture on
how that worked. The idea is the couple
figures out when ovulation is and then avoids sex in those days. And contrary to how it was done in the past,
they use complicated measurements of body temperature combined with
calendars. Heck, at the time they were
pitching a program for the Palm Pilot (remember those?) and today you can find
various programs for it on the iPhone.
So you can say “there’s an app for that.”

By comparison the Catholic Church
thinks that abortion is uniquely sinful because they believe “life begins at conception.” In other words, they consider
abortion to be the ending of a human life with a human soul. (And it is also artificial interference with
our reproductive systems, making it extra wrong in their minds.)

Now I don’t want to be seen as
picking on Catholics. Indeed on that
last point Catholics agree with many mainstream Christians. They may even be right. But again, I do not
believe the facts should be
determined by faith. You let science
determine the facts and faith can determine the morality that you apply to said
facts.

Our common morality is that once
a fetus is a person, it should be entitled to the rights of a person. The question is when is a fetus a person, and
that has to be guided both by science and morality.

Science fiction can provide some
moral clarity on the issue. That is one
of the compelling things about science fiction at its best: it imagines how
moral principles might apply to radically new circumstances. So consider for instance, this exchange in my
novel, Archangel (which you can read
about, here).
It features an intelligent, sentient alien as the main character, who
had been raised among humans. At one
point he was speaking to an FBI agent about how the criminal law might apply to
him:

“No,
probably not,” she said, “the laws on murder cover only humans. You shoot a dog
or a chimp, it isn’t murder. At worst, it is cruelty to animals.”

(She then went on to suggest that
the law needed to be changed in that respect.)

I am of the opinion that
somewhere in the universe there is other intelligent life. I don’t think we have met them or anything
like that, but with the billions of stars out there, the chances that we are
the only ones is about slim and none in my educated estimation. And should we ever meet them, probably the
first thing we will work out is whether to amend our respective murder laws to
prohibit us from killing each other.

I think the correct answer
(besides waiting until we actually meet aliens) is to treat it like
murder. This doesn’t mean that if the
aliens turn out to be more like the aliens in Independence Day than E.T. that
this would stop us from defending ourselves.
It is ordinarily murder to kill a human, but we have no trouble using
deadly force to defend ourselves, whether it is from one lone maniac (Predator) to an entire nation bent on
conquest (War of the Worlds).

Certainly that approach was adopted
in Alien Nation. Now I have not made a study of all the lore
of that fictional universe (I barely watched even one episode of the TV series,
for instance), but the basic idea was that aliens were marooned on earth and
ended up mixing with our culture, particularly in California. It was a metaphor about human immigration,
with occasional sci-fi stuff thrown in as we followed the story of two cops—one
human, one alien—trying to solve a mystery.
And in that movie, murder of one of the aliens was treated just like the
murder of a human. And I think most
people would intuit that this was exactly right.

Consider other implications from
speculative fiction. I don’t remember if
they said it outright in Alien Nation,
but they certainly suggested that there was sex going on between humans and the
aliens. Indeed sex between aliens and
humans is a common theme found in movies/television shows like the Star Trek (and its many spin offs) and
even the Mass Effect video games,
where amusingly the creators were much more comfortable with interspecies
mating than same-sex relationships. And
yet isn’t that bestiality? It’s a human
having sex with something that isn’t human.
And yet most people would not apply that term to the conduct.

Likewise people are fond of
saying that the question of abortion is about “when life begins” or “is a fetus
alive.” But the question is a
misnomer. Of course a fetus is
alive. So is that stuff growing on the
bottom of a rock. So is the grass you
mercilessly maim once every week or so with your lawn mower. When people ask that question, what they are
really asking is, “when does life that we would treat as equivalent to a fully
born person’s begin?”

The reason why I veered into
sci-fi is because how you look at murder and sex between humans and aliens
probably says something about how you answer that question: “when does life
that we would treat as equivalent to a fully born person’s begin?” If you say that it should be considered
murder to kill a Vulcan in cold blood, but it is okay to kill a fetus five
minutes before it would have been born naturally, I will wonder if you are
thinking very deeply.

Why would it be wrong to kill a Vulcan in the Star Trek universe, after
all? Well, I think the answer is because
it is a sentient being. That is our moral
intuition on the matter.

By comparison, if we were
confronted with creatures like those in Aliens,
I think most people wouldn’t even call it murder to kill one of those, for two
reasons. First, because frak them. And second, and more seriously, because they
seem little different from animals. In
other words, they are not sentient.

So for me what is key is when the
fetus reaches the “sentience threshold.”
That choice of language is deliberate because I am not talking about
when an individual fetus becomes
sentient. I do not want a regime where
less intelligent people—born and unborn—are treated was somehow life unworthy
of life. What I am saying is that when the
fetus crosses the threshold into the moment when most babies show signs of
sentience, then we should treat it from then on as a full person, as entitled
to life as any fully born baby.

Indeed, I am not the only
one. In England, where abortion was not legalized
by judicial fiat but by statutory law this
is considered a key question in the give and take their political process has
over abortion. The article I just
linked to had some evidence suggesting even as early as at twelve weeks the
fetus might be sentient, but I admit I just don’t know the science enough to be
sure. But whenever it is, that is when a
fetus is morally equivalent to a fully born human being.

Which isn’t to say that killing
it is automatically wrong. I do believe
that a woman should be allowed to get an abortion at any time if her life is at
risk. I think of it precisely the way I think
of the right of self-defense. Now you
might reasonably object that unlike in most self-defense situations, the fetus
is innocent. But the guilt or innocence
of the person threatening you is not determinative of whether you can kill to
defend yourself.

For instance, take a person who
is really, really insane. Like a classic
example is a man thinks he is squeezing oranges to make orange juice but in
fact he is strangling someone. The law
says in that case that the person is innocent of murder because he literally
doesn’t understand what he is doing (but such a person almost certainly will be
in a looney bin for the rest of his life).

Now imagine that this person hallucinates
that a person is shooting at him and he then picks up a gun and shoots in what
he thinks is self-defense. Again, if he
kills a person this way it is not a crime because he is literally so far gone
insane he doesn’t understand what he is doing.
So if he is captured, the law says he is not guilty of a crime. He will, once again, just be sent to a looney
bin.

But the fact he would not be held
morally responsible for any deaths doesn’t mean you have no right to defend
yourself against him. If he is
hallucinating a killer and in shooting at his hallucination he is shooting at
you, an innocent bystander, you have the right to pull out your own gun and
kill him. In that case it’s not that the
lunatic is a bad person or at all morally culpable. It’s that he presents you with a situation
where your life is in danger and the only way to get out of it safely is to
kill him.

So it isn’t the babies’ fault
when their very existence threatens the life of their mothers. And just as in the mad gunman situation
outlined above, maybe the most maximally moral thing to do is to risk your
life. That is, the innocent tries to
take down the mad gunman with non-lethal force, and the mother carries the child
to term at risk to her life. It may be
the moral thing to do, but I don’t think the law should require you to do it,
or more precisely to punish you for failing to live up to that ideal.

So and of course before the sentience
threshold I support other regulation.
Laws designed to make sure abortion is safe, for instance, seem utterly
reasonable. Likewise, I have no problem
with laws requiring that consent be informed, or requiring parental consent, all
before the sentience threshold is reached.

Now some pro-life types might
reasonably object that a fetus has a soul before then. I am not putting down that belief, but I don’t
believe a subjective religious belief about the facts can dictate the law. A more reasonable approach is to say, “we don’t
know what is happening before then so we should err on the side of caution.” But I don’t think we can restrict people’s
freedom based on what worry might be happening.

And likewise, I also believe that
abortion should be banned (outside of health of the mother exceptions) after
viability. Yes, there is much strange
about the logic of that approach, but if we reach a day when a woman can safely
deposit her fetus in an artificial womb and get on with her life, it seems
gratuitous to kill the baby instead. If it
won’t cost her anything and she doesn’t have to raise it, what business is it
of hers if the fetus is grown in a tank?

But here is the most important
thing I believe: Roe v. Wade needs to
be overturned. As I have said before,
this doesn’t mean that abortion will suddenly be illegal. Instead it means that abortion will, like
many other topics, be something we negotiate in the political sphere. Why is that considered such a dreadful
outcome to the left?

Update: Thanks to Vermontaigne for pointing out an embarrassing brain f-rt in the middle of discussing catholic doctrine where I accidentally said Catholics think life begins at birth. Fixed.

---------------------------------------

My wife and I have lost our jobs
due to the harassment of convicted terrorist Brett Kimberlin, including an
attempt to get us killed and to frame me for a crime carrying a sentence of up
to ten years. I know that claim sounds fantastic,
but if you read starting here, you will see absolute proof of these
claims using documentary and video evidence.
If you would like to help in the fight to hold Mr. Kimberlin
accountable, please hit the Blogger’s Defense Team button on the right. And thank you.

Follow me at Twitter @aaronworthing,
mostly for snark and site updates. And
you can purchase my book (or borrow it for free if you have Amazon Prime), Archangel: A Novel of Alternate, Recent
Historyhere.
And you can read a little more about my novel, here.

---------------------------------------

Disclaimer:

I have accused some people,
particularly Brett Kimberlin, of
reprehensible conduct. In some cases, the conduct is even
criminal. In all cases, the only justice I want is through the
appropriate legal process—such as the criminal justice system. I do not want to see vigilante violence
against any person or any threat of such violence. This kind of conduct is not only morally
wrong, but it is counter-productive.

In the particular case of Brett
Kimberlin, I do not want you to even contact him. Do not call him. Do not write him a letter. Do not write him an email. Do not text-message him. Do not engage in any kind of directed
communication. I say this in part
because under Maryland law, that can quickly become harassment and I don’t want
that to happen to him.

And for that matter, don’t go on
his property. Don’t sneak around and try
to photograph him. Frankly try not to
even be within his field of vision. Your
behavior could quickly cross the line into harassment in that way too (not to
mention trespass and other concerns).

And do not contact his
organizations, either. And most of all, leave his family alone.

The only exception to all that is
that if you are reporting on this, there is of course nothing wrong with
contacting him for things like his official response to any stories you might
report. And even then if he tells you to
stop contacting him, obey that request. That
this is a key element in making out a harassment claim under Maryland law—that
a person asks you to stop and you refuse.

And let me say something
else. In my heart of hearts, I don’t
believe that any person supporting me has done any of the above. But if any of you have, stop it, and if you
haven’t don’t start.

2 comments:

An interesting point. I honestly am surprised there isn't more discussion of fetal awareness or brain activity or even heartbeat as signs of life. It would seem to make sense, and it actually accords with the most traditional Christian understanding of the "quickening" - when the baby kicked, it was alive.

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About Me

Just a regular, sort of cranky moderately conservative lawyer, living in the greater Washington, D.C. and ruminating on law, life and the local spectator sport known as politics.
Btw, if you want to email me, write to edmd5.20.10 [at] gmail.com. I assume by now you understand that you are supposed to use one of those @ symbols for "[at]."